Jason Voorhees – Mezco’s Cinema of Fear Wave 3

Believe it or not, I’ve always kinda felt bad for this version of Jason. Honestly, after the whimper he’d gone out with at Paramount and the several year gap (which incidentally, would seem fucking brief compared to the wait for part 10 or the Vs. movie) you would think New Line, who is known for their genre outings (they were to the early 90’s what Lionsgate is to the 2000’s) that they’d have treated our favorite shitty swimmer better.

But sadly it was not to be.

Sure the movie was pretty decent by the standards of the franchise (which even I’ll admit isn’t saying much) but really New Line….WHAT THE HELL!?!?! For your ‘premiere’ Jason flick he’s barely in the fucking movie! If anyone is at all confused, and you really shouldn’t be as why would any non-fan be reading this anyways? Jason Goes to Hell, the ninth in the long running series, featured Jason getting his ass blown all to fuck. Which of course necessitated his having to ‘possess’ others to carry out his murderous escapades.

Did I mention that this all starts with his coroner eating his mongo sized pulsating black (REALLY!) heart? ‘Cause it did, and every time he jumped bodies it required him to shit into the new guy’s mouth…..Well that is until he turns into a mini demon who shoots up his dead relative’s vagina, where he’s then reborn- mask and all. It’s really a decent flick, honest.

So let’s get to this sumbitches’ review.

SCULPT:

What can I say? As you see above it’s a damn solid sculpt that actually managed to improve upon the original look. If you look at how he looks in the film you’ll see that he comes off far more ‘squat’ as Kane Hodder, the actor portraying Jason, is a solidly built dude. However this tends to leave Jason looking wide but not really well proportioned. Since the sculptors aren’t hindered by such things as having to accommodate for an actor in several pounds of makeup and prosthetics, they can instead make the figure a damn sight more streamlined. In fact I’d say he nearly has the best sculpt of the Mezco figures, if not for a few problems that lie not in the sculpt itself, but I’ll get to that in a moment.

A large part of why I love this figure is mainly due to it’s heavy texture, in the film Jason sports a heavily scarred skull (unlike part 7 his body isn’t quite as on display) which really goes to show the extent of his injuries over the course of the series. Although some of his injuries are missing, but that is later explained in part 10. Still, and this isn’t the figures fault, but how did his eye injury ‘jump’ from his left to his right?

eh whatever 😛

Long and short the figure sports some great detail in the horribly mutated and scarred skin and better yet in his clothing. All in all it’s one of the series better jobs in terms of accuracy and detail.

PAINT:

And here it starts to go wrong. Now I can handle some slop on the main body, that being the clothes guys, since Jason never struck me as the ‘clean’ sort so I can really see him as having a sort of weird colorization of fabric on his clothes. Aside from a little slop on the narrower tears he’s doing alright here. Of course that doesn’t count his mask and head. Now, from a distance, he looks pretty good, nothing you wouldn’t expect. However when one looks closer-

As you can see the paint isn’t all that great. Most bothersome is the overdone blood and the ‘mascara’ around his eye holes. I won’t fault the skin tone as that really is how he looked, but watch for bleeding onto the masks straps. Still sitting on your shelf he shouldn’t be a bother, just don’t look too close.

ARTICULATION-

Prepare for some bitching. The previous Jason’s in this line have all had the best articulation that the character has ever seen. Shit, it was really the only time he’d ever gotten anything was halfway decent. Some of the problems are that his arms sport an elongated, almost cartoony, look – same goes for his hands which look far too large in regards to the rest of him. His waist allows for some ‘ok’ movement, mainly the ability to bend over (I kid you not). The wrists and elbows sport the same obvious joints, but that’s how it’s been since day one so I’m sorta used to it now.

My main gripe is his goddamn shoulders. See the previous two sported ball-jointed shoulders which did a serviceable job of concealing the joint and allowed for the widest range of movement the character had seen yet in his action figure form. But for some fucking reason Mezco felt that something that worked perfectly TWO TIMES BEFORE just wasn’t good enough now. No, NOW the retarded fucker in the hockey mask comes to us sported hinged joints. Know what that means? It means instead of concealed shoulder joints, we now have VERY obvious hinges that often divert your attention away from the main sculpt. Major drop of the ball here in my opinion.

ACCESSORIES:

Not much to say here really, which is a shame. See since the lines inception Cinema of Fear has had the rep. for including a ton of accessories. Shit the first Freddy technically came with a second figure! Sadly, and I blame a lot of this on rising oil costs and such, the accessories grow fewer and fewer. This line by far sports the least per figure. To be fair that really isn’t much of a hindrance here since he was technically damn near a guest star in his own movie. He gets the standard machete, and it’s decent enough for what it is, would’ve liked it be a little duller and closer to gray than silver – remember the one he has in the movie looks fucking OLD. Aside from that he gets his heart, which is a surprising RED and not black and it doesn’t look even half as mutated as it did in the film. Carrying on this theme, we also get Jason in his ‘demon’ form. Now I haven’t watched the flick in decent amount of time (around October If I remember right) but this fucking thing looks only vaguely like it. Last but not least we get the one accessory I didn’t expect: The bone dagger from Evil Dead 2. The fans of this flick know that both the Necronomicon and dagger make an appearance in the film… for no fucking real reason. Honestly would it’ve strained the damn FX Dept. to slap together a demonic dagger on their own? All this did was cause more fan wanking about whether Ash and Jason will ever face off onscreen one day (here’s a hint: They WON’T) and naturally the details are a bit soft here, don’t wanna be sued I think.

…eh it’s no really biggie, aside from the machete, would you really toss these things on display with the figure? I know I’m tossing them in a box when this is all over (in fact I had to track them down for this very review!)

So anyways… Despite his brief appearance in his own film… the ninth variant of Jason is (in my opinion at least) one of the most interesting since the famous ‘part 7’ look. This figure is a great addition to your collection, especially if you are like me, and yearn for every version to one day be released. There are numerous flaws but overall it is a decent figure, however I’d suggest trying to find it at a sale price and avoid the $18.99 price tags I’ve seen it for in some places.

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KyleThoreau is a time-traveling axe murderer from the 1800’s. He stopped in the 2000’s because he ran out of the secret time-travel juice that the cyborg clone of Abe Lincoln gave him. He must now find the clone of Abe to return to his time-travel duties. In the meantime he has decided to report on geeky news and read comic books.